Link – Wellformedness

Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?

My colleague Richard Sproat and I recently went through it with “general science” journal editors regarding an overhyped- and undercooked paper about the origins of writing on Easter Island. Language Log has the scoop.

ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language

The first ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL) will be held in conjunction with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada, on July 13th or 14th 2023 (TBD). It will feature invited talks by Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University) and Amalia Gnanadesikan (University of Maryland, College Park). We welcome submissions of scientific papers to be presented at the conference and archived in the ACL Anthology. Information on submission and format will be posted at https://cawl.wellformedness.com shortly.

Grapholinguistics talk

Here are slides from a talk, coauthored with Richard Sproat, given at the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century conference, on how we talk about writing systems in speech and language processing. We will try to get this into archival form soon.

A* shortest string decoding for non-idempotent semirings

I recently completed some work, in collaboration with Google’s Cyril Allauzen, on a new algorithm for computing the shortest string through weighted finite-state automaton. For so-called path semirings, the shortest string is given by the shortest path, but up until now, there was no general-purpose algorithm for computing the shortest string over non-idempotent semirings (like the log or probability semiring). Such an algorithm would make it much easier to decode with interpolated language models or elaborate channel models in a noisy-channel formalism. In this preprint, we propose such an algorithm using A* search and lazy (“on-the-fly”) determinization, and prove that it is correct. The algorithm in question is implemented in my OpenGrm-BaumWelch library by the baumwelchdecode command-line tool.

WFST talk

I have posted a lightly-revised slide deck from a talk I gave at Johns Hopkins University here. In it, I give my most detailed-yet description of the weighted finite-state transducer formalism and describe two reasonably interesting algorithms, the optimization algorithm underlying Pynini’s optimize method and Thrax’s Optimize function, and a new A*-based single shortest string algorithm for non-idempotent semirings underlying BaumWelch’s baumwelchdecode CLI tool.

My SYNC talk

The handout from my SYNC talk, on phonotactics, is available here. I plan to revise it in the next few months and then post it at LingBuzz at some point.

Anatomy of an analogy

I have posted a lightly-revised version of the handout of a talk I gave at Stony Brook University last November here on LingBuzz. In it, I argue that analogical leveling phenomena in Latin previously attributed to pressures against interparadigmatic analogy or towards phonological process overapplication are better understood as the result of Neogrammarian sound change, loss of productivy, and finally covert reanalysis.

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